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“SO UNSEXY”:

INTIMACY

Alanis Morissette did not release the song “So Unsexy” until 2002, when the song appeared on her fifth studio album, Under Rug Swept. By that time, Morissette was twenty-eight years old and had begun to write songs not only about yearning for justice and exorcising her anger, but about the subtle, tender dynamics of long-term relationships and the struggle—and also joy—of maintaining and nurturing a committed romance. “So Unsexy” is, more than anything,

a song about how difficult it can be to give your love to another person when you still have not learned how to offer it to yourself. “Oh, these little rejections, how they add up quickly,” Morissette sings. “One small sideways look and I feel so ungood.” She explores just how easy it is to sink into insecurity in a relationship when you are still holding on to trauma and doubt from your past.

In the musical, the song takes place after a tense phone call between Steve and Mary Jane. Steve calls from Manhattan; it’s going to be another late night at the office. Mary Jane reminds him that they were supposed to decorate the Christmas tree, but not to bother coming home. She feels abandoned; he feels rejected. They are not communicating—they are simply talking past each other, isolated in their bubbles of hurt and silence. This song signifies a low point in their marriage: they’ve stopped being intimate, they’ve even stopped kissing. They both feel so unsexy to someone they find so beautiful. This is a moment in the show to dive into the alienation that can happen in adult relationships when either person is not being honest—about their past, their secrets, their needs. Mary Jane doesn’t want to be intimate because her car accident triggered her past sexual trauma. Steve has become over-involved in his work—and in porn—because he doesn’t know how to stop moving and

truly notice the disturbances in his family life. Both of them want to reach out, but they can’t quite cross the divide. They are left feeling lonely on either side of a bad phone call, longing for the closeness they once had.

Though the emotional range on Jagged Little Pill, the album, is vast, it doesn’t quite address the simmering resentment of a long-married couple unable to find the words to be open with one another. As the team was searching for a ballad for Steve and Mary Jane to sing past each other to show their disconnection, they realized they might need to look to Morissette’s greater body of work. One afternoon at a meeting at her house, the singer suggested “So Unsexy,”

and according to Diablo Cody, the idea just clicked. “I had heard the song before, but it had never occurred to me,” Cody says. “It was kind of perfect, because we had been talking about how we thought it would be powerful and relatable for Mary Jane and Steve to have this sexual dysfunction because of the long-term impact of rape and assault on survivors.”

Cody said she felt it was powerful to hear the song, which had previously only been sung by a woman, to be shared by a husband and wife. “I would’ve never imagined it sung from the male perspective because I hear a song called ’So Unsexy,’ and I relate to it on a level of society expecting me to be sexy all the time,” Cody says. “Which is a pressure that we think of as being specific to women. But then to hear it sung from the perspective of a man who’s being sexually rejected by someone that he truly loves and is longing to be intimate with, it just broke my heart.”

“They are simply talking past
each other, isolated in their
bubbles of hurt and silence.”